Collected Short Fiction, page 831
“But not a shard of pottery.” She shrugged an apology at Derek. “Not a stone that might have been a tool.”
Derek was fretting to move on, but suddenly she was prying out something else. A slender sliver of some glassy stuff that had a pale yellow color under the flakes of clay. She scraped them off and dug again. We were there another hour. She found another sliver and another, till she had a dozen. We helped her clean them and fit some of them together.
“Another horn?” Ram asked her. “Or what sort of thing would have bones like that?”
“No horn.” She wiped at the dust on her forehead. “But these were really bones.” She lifted two yellow fragments. “The ball and socket of a joint. See how they fit. But the odd thing—” She bent to frown at them. “They’re brittle, but something harder than calcium. Maybe silicon. They aren’t the bones of anything I know. And these.”
She picked up one of those yellow splinters and raised her dark glasses to squint at it.
“They look like shells. Too badly shattered for any reconstruction. They look like the exoskeleton of an insect, but too big to come from any insect I know. It looks worth another dig, if we can get a grant for it.”
We carried the little pile of fragments back to the tent, gulped precious water, and plodded out again across the sandbank north of us. Derek kept peering at his radar image. He stopped us where he said his arc of buried stones must be. All we saw was the wind-rippled sand, but suddenly he was shading his eyes to look farther on.
“Those rocks! Let’s see what they are.”
They were huge, jutting five or six feet out of the sand. He had us stop for photos, and rushed us on to see them close. They were identical, two square columns of smooth black stone, some ten feet square and spaced twice as far apart.
“They’re the center stones I found on the visual image.” Derek squinted again at his radar map. “They stand on bedrock, under the sand. See that shadow? I think it’s the lintel stone that lay across the top to frame the gate.”
“Gate to where?” Lupe asked.
“To hell.” Ram shrugged. “If you remember my Little Mama. My father never believed her tales, but I did when I heard them. What kind of hell I don’t think she knew. She was certainly terrified of whatever she thought might follow her thought the gate.”
“No matter what she meant,” Lupe said, “I’ve never seen any prehistoric stonework to match it. It should certainly get us a grant.”
Derek was already tramping on to study the nearest stone. It was an odd black granite, veined with thin green streaks, perfectly squared, polished slick. He rubbed it with his finger and blinked at Lupe.
“What do you think?”
“It’s impossible.” She looked dazed. “I’m no geologist, but I never saw stone like this. It certainly wasn’t quarried anywhere near. No culture so old ever worked stone so well.”
Derek started on around the column, searching for inscriptions. Ram followed. Only a step or two behind him, I stopped to look at an odd green mark that might have been a character in some unfamiliar script. I heard him gasp. When I turned back he was gone.
“Ram!” Lupe was calling. “Ram?”
We heard no answer. We ran on around the column, then around the other. We scattered out to search the sand around us and found no footprints, no sign of him or where he had gone. We were gathering again in the shadow of the column when he came staggering back out of nowhere and fell on his face right beside me.
We dropped to our knees around him. He wasn’t breathing. His skin was blue, that tiny birthmark starkly white.
His hand felt limp and lifeless when I caught it. We turned him over. I’d brought a canteen. Lupe wet her bandana and wiped the sand off his mouth and nostrils. His eyes looked glassy when she opened them. She took his pulse.
“He’s alive,” she whispered. “Just barely.”
His chest moved. He gasped for air, coughed, and tried to sit up. We lifted him to sit against the pillar. Lupe put the canteen to his lips. He gulped, strangled, and sat there breathing hard, his eyes closed again. It must have been an hour before he roused himself to look at us.
“Something—something happened. I don’t know what.”
His voice was a labored wheeze, and he had another fit of coughing before he found the breath to go on.
“The sand crumbled under me. I slid down into a dark place—I don’t know where. The fall knocked my breath out. I couldn’t get it back. The air—the air hurt my lungs like burning sulfur. I had to climb back up the rubble slope. Nearly—nearly passed out before I made it.”
He wanted water. Lupe offered the canteen. It shook in his hands till she took it and held it to his mouth. He took a few swallows, coughed, and gave her a feeble smile.
“What was the place?” she asked him. “What did you see?”
“Not—not much.” He had another fit of coughing. “It was too dark. The fumes burned my eyes. The sky—a dim red sky. Like low clouds with fire behind them. I remember great square column standing all around me. Every pair had a lintel block across the top.”
“Trilithons?” she whispered. “Like Stonehenge?”
“Like gates.” He nodded and stopped for another long breath. “Like this one.” He touched the pendant under his thin tee-shirt. “I never saw Stonehenge, but I think this circle was bigger. A lot bigger. Seven gates, all of them open. Nothing but red sky and dark rock behind them.”
He wheezed and had to cough again.
“These two stones—” He lifted his hand toward the other column and looked up at Derek. “I saw the lintel stone you found under the sand.” He was gasping again. “It was back—back across them at the top.”
His eyes were inflamed and tearing. He wiped at them and lay back against the column. Lupe gave him a few minutes to rest.
“Was that all?” she asked. “Can’t you recall anything else?”
“Not really.” He caught a long breath and blinked at her. “It took forever to get back here. That was all I thought about. I do remember a pop in my ears, like you get when a plane makes a quick change of altitude. And something like the feel you get when a fast elevator starts up. But nothing about it makes any sense.”
“Or maybe it does.” Eyes narrowed, Derek gazed out across the dune. “If what you felt was real—”
“It was real. Too real! It nearly killed me.”
“I wonder,” Derek whispered. “Could you have been somewhere off the Earth? I never believed any possible spacecraft could ever cross the distances between the stars, but that change in air pressure and gravity—” Awe hushed his voice.
“Maybe somebody found another way across space.”
“What way?” Lupe stared at him. “What way is possible?”
“The math of space and time has been a sort of quicksand since Einstein and the others found limits to Newton’s laws. There are theories of wormholes between the stars, but no proof they are possible. Maybe, just maybe, we’re on the brink of finding out.”
“He was gone.” Lupe nodded slowly. “He as almost asphyxiated. But what does that have to do with the stars?”
“I want to know.” He stopped to peer at the two great stones and the dunes beyond them. “I want to know what this is. Who was here. What they did. Why they went away.”
“I don’t care.” Ram shivered. “An ugly place. I’ve had nightmares, but nothing like it. We’ve got no business here.”
3.
The air was suddenly cooler when the sun went down. Ram felt able to walk with us back to the tent, refusing any help. Lupe wanted a campfire, but there was nothing to bum. In the pale glow of an electric lantern, we ate a cold meal out of cartons and cans, and debated what to do next.
“We’d better keep quiet about what happened to Ram,” Lupe said. “What with the bones and photos of the megaliths themselves, there’s enough we can carry back to get another grant. We can be back next summer with an expedition to write ourselves into history.”
“Next summer?” Derek shook his head. “I don’t want to wait. This thing’s too big to leave alone.”
“There is more we can do right now.” She nodded. “Dig for more bones. And those silicon splinters. I wonder what they are.”
She stared off into the dark.
“Whatever you find, don’t publish too much.” Ram shook his head at her. “Not if you want to come back. You could lose the site.”
“Huh?” Derek blinked.
“Jealous bureaucrats. Frontiers here aren’t marked on the sand. If the site’s anything important, two or three nations will be clamoring to claim it as a national treasure. You’ll be frozen out of the game.”
“Which means we’ve got to learn more while we can.” He turned to stare at Ram. “I’ve been thinking. You were somewhere. You felt that different gravity and air pressure. I think you were off the Earth. I don’t know why this place was built, but there had to be a reason.”
Lupe frowned at him.
“If those pillars framed some sort of gate, I want to get through it.”
“Through it?” She looked blank. “How? I’ve walked all around both stones. So did you. Where’s any gate?”
“I wonder.” Derek looked toward the megaliths, lost now in the dark. “Ram was wearing his pendant. His Little Mama called it a key. We found magnetism in it. Could be it trips some kind of lock.”
“The key to hell.” Ram shook his head. “That’s what she called it. I didn’t see Satan or anything alive, but that place did have the look and sulfur stink of hell.” He shivered. “You can’t breathe there.”
“You know—” Derek sat straighten “We’d have to get oxygen equipment, but we can try to find out if it really is a key to anywhere. Let’s call the chopper back.”
“Oxygen equipment?” Ram shook his head, his dark features grim. “If you’d been there, you wouldn’t be so keen about it.”
I’d tried to smooth the sand under my sleeping bag, but I never found a good fit for my body. With too much to think about, I hardly slept. Up before the sun, Ram made coffee and pancakes on a propane stove while Lupe labeled her collected bones and sealed them in plastic bags. When we called the chopper pilot, Ram wanted to get out with him.
“A place we don’t belong.” He stared across the sand at the two great megaliths, still dark in the shadow of the dune and ominous even to me. “I don’t like it here.”
“It’s your chance to learn who your Little Mama was,” Lupe told him. “If she really got here through some kind of gate.” She peered at his birthmark. “Maybe your chance to learn who you are.”
He rubbed at the mark and shook his head.
“It might be better if I never know.”
Yet he agreed to stay and help her at the dig while Derek and I went out to Tunis. I’d spent a year in Paris, writing a novel that never sold, before I came back home to teach English lit. With my little French and his little English, the pilot and I got on well enough. Content to assume that the megaliths were Greek or Roman, he was baffled by our interest in them. I don’t think he liked the erg any better than Ram did, but the tourist season had been slow. He wanted our money.
We left Lupe and Ram at work in the dig, dwindling figures beside our tiny tent, soon lost in the sand’s blinding glare. The infinite sea of star dunes caught me again with an uneasy fascination. I felt relieved to escape it, even for a day.
The engine noise made conversation difficult, but we had time to think.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Derek raised his voice and gestured at the intricate pattern of waves on the tawny ocean of sand below, wind-carved cup and wind-piled point, wind-carved cup and wind-piled point, repeated forever. Empty of life or motion, the erg seemed as strange to me as the alien landscape Ram had glimpsed beyond the megaliths.
“Just wind and sand.” He was silent for a time, gazing through the window, and turned slowly back to me, smiling with what must have been a sort of rapture. “But look at the shape of the dunes. An infinite order born out of chaos. It’s a kind of natural art if you can see it. A harmony of nature, as unexpected but yet complete as the movements of a symphony.”
He paused to peer at me.
“Don’t you get it? The grand enigma of our universe. The joy of science, the power of math, the elation of discovery.” He looked out again, speaking half to himself, yet eager to share what he felt. “That’s the mystery of the natural creation. Galaxies and planets, life and mind grown from the fire and dust of the big bang. That’s the enchantment of science. New vistas of wonder exploding out of every advance.”
I tried to get it, but the dunes seemed more cruel than beautiful. I felt stunned by too much wonder, glad to get out of the erg and back across the mountains, cheered to see roads again and a freight train crawling around a curve, the green circles and squares of irrigated farms. Here were things men had made, things I thought I understood.
The pilot stopped at Gabes to have a mechanic check something about the engine. Dusk had fallen before we got back to our hotel. Washed free of sweat and sand, we went out for dinner. Derek found an Internet cafe and spent an hour on a computer.
Standing behind him, I watched math symbols flicker across the screen and glimpsed articles about dark matter and dark energy, about negative mass and negative time, about a false vacuum that might generate an infinite foam of universes. None of it meant anything to me or seemed to satisfy him.
“Nothing.” At last he shrugged and quit. “If what happened to Ram is what I think it might be, most of what we think we know will all have to be rewritten.”
Next morning we met the pilot at an Italian bank. Derek released the escrow to give him the balance of his fee and bargained to renew our charter. We found a supply house and I used my own credit card to buy oxygen systems. Four 35-liter units, complete with masks, cylinders, regulators, gauges, tubing, and smoke hoods.
Noon had passed before we got back across the dunes to the camp. We found Ram waiting alone beside the tent. In haste to get out before dark, the pilot dumped our crates and took off at once. I saw nothing of Lupe. When Derek asked where she was, Ram shook his head in a dazed way.
“I don’t know.” He stared blankly across the sand at the black megaliths, his features drawn tight. “I don’t know.”
Derek led him out of the sun, back into the shadow of the tent flap. I gave him a cold beer we’d brought from Gabes. Squatting on the sand, he gulped a few swallows, set the bottle down, and rubbed absently at the little white birthmark on his forehead.
“It itches,” he muttered, “since I went through.”
“Tell us,” Derek urged him. “What became of her.”
“This morning.” Peering anxiously back at the megaliths, he spoke in abrupt and disjointed phrases. “Early. We’d had breakfast. She was already down at the dig. I walked out of sight over the ridge to relieve myself. I heard her yell. Pulled my pants up. Ran back.
Saw them coming.”
His head jerked toward the megaliths. His hoarse voice stopped and he stared toward them till Derek asked him to go on.
“Three.” He was almost whispering. “Three monsters. Gigantic. Jumping. She tried to run. They jumped too fast.”
“Monsters? What were they like?”
“Nothing on earth.” He shivered and stared at the megaliths, his lean black finger on the white birthmark. “Maybe like insects. Maybe like grasshoppers, if grasshoppers could be as big as airplanes. Not much like anything. They were hideous. Splotched yellow and green. Shiny like glass. Great red eyes that blazed like fire. Long hind legs. Short front limbs with claws.”
He shuddered again.
“Terrible claws. All bright metal the color of silver. Great metal jaws. And the things had wings. Stubby little wings that seemed too short. Spread when they glided. They came too fast for me. Nothing I could do.”
He shoulders sagged in helpless regret.
“One of them took her. Snatched her up with those bright claws. Gone with her before I got back to the tent. Carried her back to the monuments. Crawled between them. Never came out. Took her back to the hell where I was.”
He wiped at his eyes.
“No air there. No air she can breathe. I’m afraid she’s dead.”
“Maybe not.” Derek caught his arm. “We brought the oxygen gear. We can go after her. Try to find where she is and help her if we can. If your key can take us through.”
He cringed again.
“Of course.” He picked up the beer and got stiffly to his feet. “If we can.”
He stood a moment staring blankly down at the old water hole.
“If we can,” he muttered again, and shook his head. “If she’s alive.” He shivered. “I—I loved her. She found me shoveling dirt at Koobi Fora. She helped get me to college on the track scholarship. She brought me back to Africa to work with her on two more summer digs. She—well, she gave me a life.
He turned his head to hide his tears.
The western sun was already low, and the day had been exhausting. We could have rested and prepared for an early morning start, but nobody spoke of that. We uncrated three of the oxygen units and found the manuals. Printed in French and Arabic, they were brief and cryptic, but Ram deciphered them. We got the units assembled and tried them on. The smoke hoods had a sharp plastic stink and made vision difficult.
“No matter.” Derek’s muffled voice was hard to hear. “Not if they keep us alive.”
Ram asked how long the oxygen would last.
“Depends on demand,” Derek told him. “I hope it’s long enough.”
“To overtake those hopping things?” Ram took off the hood, wiped sweat off his forehead, shook his head. “We’ll never find Lupe alive. Not in the place where I was.”
“We can look,” Derek said. “If those trilithons are terminal gates—” His voice trailed off, but he caught his breath and went on. “We’ll go where we can. Learn what we can. Help Lupe if we can. Let’s get on with it.”
I longed for the comfort of a weapon, but airport security had forbidden knives or guns. We went empty handed, but the oxygen cylinders themselves made heavy burdens. We wore canteens of water clipped to our belts. I had a light backpack stuffed with a flashlight, spare batteries, a jacket, and not much else.
Derek was fretting to move on, but suddenly she was prying out something else. A slender sliver of some glassy stuff that had a pale yellow color under the flakes of clay. She scraped them off and dug again. We were there another hour. She found another sliver and another, till she had a dozen. We helped her clean them and fit some of them together.
“Another horn?” Ram asked her. “Or what sort of thing would have bones like that?”
“No horn.” She wiped at the dust on her forehead. “But these were really bones.” She lifted two yellow fragments. “The ball and socket of a joint. See how they fit. But the odd thing—” She bent to frown at them. “They’re brittle, but something harder than calcium. Maybe silicon. They aren’t the bones of anything I know. And these.”
She picked up one of those yellow splinters and raised her dark glasses to squint at it.
“They look like shells. Too badly shattered for any reconstruction. They look like the exoskeleton of an insect, but too big to come from any insect I know. It looks worth another dig, if we can get a grant for it.”
We carried the little pile of fragments back to the tent, gulped precious water, and plodded out again across the sandbank north of us. Derek kept peering at his radar image. He stopped us where he said his arc of buried stones must be. All we saw was the wind-rippled sand, but suddenly he was shading his eyes to look farther on.
“Those rocks! Let’s see what they are.”
They were huge, jutting five or six feet out of the sand. He had us stop for photos, and rushed us on to see them close. They were identical, two square columns of smooth black stone, some ten feet square and spaced twice as far apart.
“They’re the center stones I found on the visual image.” Derek squinted again at his radar map. “They stand on bedrock, under the sand. See that shadow? I think it’s the lintel stone that lay across the top to frame the gate.”
“Gate to where?” Lupe asked.
“To hell.” Ram shrugged. “If you remember my Little Mama. My father never believed her tales, but I did when I heard them. What kind of hell I don’t think she knew. She was certainly terrified of whatever she thought might follow her thought the gate.”
“No matter what she meant,” Lupe said, “I’ve never seen any prehistoric stonework to match it. It should certainly get us a grant.”
Derek was already tramping on to study the nearest stone. It was an odd black granite, veined with thin green streaks, perfectly squared, polished slick. He rubbed it with his finger and blinked at Lupe.
“What do you think?”
“It’s impossible.” She looked dazed. “I’m no geologist, but I never saw stone like this. It certainly wasn’t quarried anywhere near. No culture so old ever worked stone so well.”
Derek started on around the column, searching for inscriptions. Ram followed. Only a step or two behind him, I stopped to look at an odd green mark that might have been a character in some unfamiliar script. I heard him gasp. When I turned back he was gone.
“Ram!” Lupe was calling. “Ram?”
We heard no answer. We ran on around the column, then around the other. We scattered out to search the sand around us and found no footprints, no sign of him or where he had gone. We were gathering again in the shadow of the column when he came staggering back out of nowhere and fell on his face right beside me.
We dropped to our knees around him. He wasn’t breathing. His skin was blue, that tiny birthmark starkly white.
His hand felt limp and lifeless when I caught it. We turned him over. I’d brought a canteen. Lupe wet her bandana and wiped the sand off his mouth and nostrils. His eyes looked glassy when she opened them. She took his pulse.
“He’s alive,” she whispered. “Just barely.”
His chest moved. He gasped for air, coughed, and tried to sit up. We lifted him to sit against the pillar. Lupe put the canteen to his lips. He gulped, strangled, and sat there breathing hard, his eyes closed again. It must have been an hour before he roused himself to look at us.
“Something—something happened. I don’t know what.”
His voice was a labored wheeze, and he had another fit of coughing before he found the breath to go on.
“The sand crumbled under me. I slid down into a dark place—I don’t know where. The fall knocked my breath out. I couldn’t get it back. The air—the air hurt my lungs like burning sulfur. I had to climb back up the rubble slope. Nearly—nearly passed out before I made it.”
He wanted water. Lupe offered the canteen. It shook in his hands till she took it and held it to his mouth. He took a few swallows, coughed, and gave her a feeble smile.
“What was the place?” she asked him. “What did you see?”
“Not—not much.” He had another fit of coughing. “It was too dark. The fumes burned my eyes. The sky—a dim red sky. Like low clouds with fire behind them. I remember great square column standing all around me. Every pair had a lintel block across the top.”
“Trilithons?” she whispered. “Like Stonehenge?”
“Like gates.” He nodded and stopped for another long breath. “Like this one.” He touched the pendant under his thin tee-shirt. “I never saw Stonehenge, but I think this circle was bigger. A lot bigger. Seven gates, all of them open. Nothing but red sky and dark rock behind them.”
He wheezed and had to cough again.
“These two stones—” He lifted his hand toward the other column and looked up at Derek. “I saw the lintel stone you found under the sand.” He was gasping again. “It was back—back across them at the top.”
His eyes were inflamed and tearing. He wiped at them and lay back against the column. Lupe gave him a few minutes to rest.
“Was that all?” she asked. “Can’t you recall anything else?”
“Not really.” He caught a long breath and blinked at her. “It took forever to get back here. That was all I thought about. I do remember a pop in my ears, like you get when a plane makes a quick change of altitude. And something like the feel you get when a fast elevator starts up. But nothing about it makes any sense.”
“Or maybe it does.” Eyes narrowed, Derek gazed out across the dune. “If what you felt was real—”
“It was real. Too real! It nearly killed me.”
“I wonder,” Derek whispered. “Could you have been somewhere off the Earth? I never believed any possible spacecraft could ever cross the distances between the stars, but that change in air pressure and gravity—” Awe hushed his voice.
“Maybe somebody found another way across space.”
“What way?” Lupe stared at him. “What way is possible?”
“The math of space and time has been a sort of quicksand since Einstein and the others found limits to Newton’s laws. There are theories of wormholes between the stars, but no proof they are possible. Maybe, just maybe, we’re on the brink of finding out.”
“He was gone.” Lupe nodded slowly. “He as almost asphyxiated. But what does that have to do with the stars?”
“I want to know.” He stopped to peer at the two great stones and the dunes beyond them. “I want to know what this is. Who was here. What they did. Why they went away.”
“I don’t care.” Ram shivered. “An ugly place. I’ve had nightmares, but nothing like it. We’ve got no business here.”
3.
The air was suddenly cooler when the sun went down. Ram felt able to walk with us back to the tent, refusing any help. Lupe wanted a campfire, but there was nothing to bum. In the pale glow of an electric lantern, we ate a cold meal out of cartons and cans, and debated what to do next.
“We’d better keep quiet about what happened to Ram,” Lupe said. “What with the bones and photos of the megaliths themselves, there’s enough we can carry back to get another grant. We can be back next summer with an expedition to write ourselves into history.”
“Next summer?” Derek shook his head. “I don’t want to wait. This thing’s too big to leave alone.”
“There is more we can do right now.” She nodded. “Dig for more bones. And those silicon splinters. I wonder what they are.”
She stared off into the dark.
“Whatever you find, don’t publish too much.” Ram shook his head at her. “Not if you want to come back. You could lose the site.”
“Huh?” Derek blinked.
“Jealous bureaucrats. Frontiers here aren’t marked on the sand. If the site’s anything important, two or three nations will be clamoring to claim it as a national treasure. You’ll be frozen out of the game.”
“Which means we’ve got to learn more while we can.” He turned to stare at Ram. “I’ve been thinking. You were somewhere. You felt that different gravity and air pressure. I think you were off the Earth. I don’t know why this place was built, but there had to be a reason.”
Lupe frowned at him.
“If those pillars framed some sort of gate, I want to get through it.”
“Through it?” She looked blank. “How? I’ve walked all around both stones. So did you. Where’s any gate?”
“I wonder.” Derek looked toward the megaliths, lost now in the dark. “Ram was wearing his pendant. His Little Mama called it a key. We found magnetism in it. Could be it trips some kind of lock.”
“The key to hell.” Ram shook his head. “That’s what she called it. I didn’t see Satan or anything alive, but that place did have the look and sulfur stink of hell.” He shivered. “You can’t breathe there.”
“You know—” Derek sat straighten “We’d have to get oxygen equipment, but we can try to find out if it really is a key to anywhere. Let’s call the chopper back.”
“Oxygen equipment?” Ram shook his head, his dark features grim. “If you’d been there, you wouldn’t be so keen about it.”
I’d tried to smooth the sand under my sleeping bag, but I never found a good fit for my body. With too much to think about, I hardly slept. Up before the sun, Ram made coffee and pancakes on a propane stove while Lupe labeled her collected bones and sealed them in plastic bags. When we called the chopper pilot, Ram wanted to get out with him.
“A place we don’t belong.” He stared across the sand at the two great megaliths, still dark in the shadow of the dune and ominous even to me. “I don’t like it here.”
“It’s your chance to learn who your Little Mama was,” Lupe told him. “If she really got here through some kind of gate.” She peered at his birthmark. “Maybe your chance to learn who you are.”
He rubbed at the mark and shook his head.
“It might be better if I never know.”
Yet he agreed to stay and help her at the dig while Derek and I went out to Tunis. I’d spent a year in Paris, writing a novel that never sold, before I came back home to teach English lit. With my little French and his little English, the pilot and I got on well enough. Content to assume that the megaliths were Greek or Roman, he was baffled by our interest in them. I don’t think he liked the erg any better than Ram did, but the tourist season had been slow. He wanted our money.
We left Lupe and Ram at work in the dig, dwindling figures beside our tiny tent, soon lost in the sand’s blinding glare. The infinite sea of star dunes caught me again with an uneasy fascination. I felt relieved to escape it, even for a day.
The engine noise made conversation difficult, but we had time to think.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Derek raised his voice and gestured at the intricate pattern of waves on the tawny ocean of sand below, wind-carved cup and wind-piled point, wind-carved cup and wind-piled point, repeated forever. Empty of life or motion, the erg seemed as strange to me as the alien landscape Ram had glimpsed beyond the megaliths.
“Just wind and sand.” He was silent for a time, gazing through the window, and turned slowly back to me, smiling with what must have been a sort of rapture. “But look at the shape of the dunes. An infinite order born out of chaos. It’s a kind of natural art if you can see it. A harmony of nature, as unexpected but yet complete as the movements of a symphony.”
He paused to peer at me.
“Don’t you get it? The grand enigma of our universe. The joy of science, the power of math, the elation of discovery.” He looked out again, speaking half to himself, yet eager to share what he felt. “That’s the mystery of the natural creation. Galaxies and planets, life and mind grown from the fire and dust of the big bang. That’s the enchantment of science. New vistas of wonder exploding out of every advance.”
I tried to get it, but the dunes seemed more cruel than beautiful. I felt stunned by too much wonder, glad to get out of the erg and back across the mountains, cheered to see roads again and a freight train crawling around a curve, the green circles and squares of irrigated farms. Here were things men had made, things I thought I understood.
The pilot stopped at Gabes to have a mechanic check something about the engine. Dusk had fallen before we got back to our hotel. Washed free of sweat and sand, we went out for dinner. Derek found an Internet cafe and spent an hour on a computer.
Standing behind him, I watched math symbols flicker across the screen and glimpsed articles about dark matter and dark energy, about negative mass and negative time, about a false vacuum that might generate an infinite foam of universes. None of it meant anything to me or seemed to satisfy him.
“Nothing.” At last he shrugged and quit. “If what happened to Ram is what I think it might be, most of what we think we know will all have to be rewritten.”
Next morning we met the pilot at an Italian bank. Derek released the escrow to give him the balance of his fee and bargained to renew our charter. We found a supply house and I used my own credit card to buy oxygen systems. Four 35-liter units, complete with masks, cylinders, regulators, gauges, tubing, and smoke hoods.
Noon had passed before we got back across the dunes to the camp. We found Ram waiting alone beside the tent. In haste to get out before dark, the pilot dumped our crates and took off at once. I saw nothing of Lupe. When Derek asked where she was, Ram shook his head in a dazed way.
“I don’t know.” He stared blankly across the sand at the black megaliths, his features drawn tight. “I don’t know.”
Derek led him out of the sun, back into the shadow of the tent flap. I gave him a cold beer we’d brought from Gabes. Squatting on the sand, he gulped a few swallows, set the bottle down, and rubbed absently at the little white birthmark on his forehead.
“It itches,” he muttered, “since I went through.”
“Tell us,” Derek urged him. “What became of her.”
“This morning.” Peering anxiously back at the megaliths, he spoke in abrupt and disjointed phrases. “Early. We’d had breakfast. She was already down at the dig. I walked out of sight over the ridge to relieve myself. I heard her yell. Pulled my pants up. Ran back.
Saw them coming.”
His head jerked toward the megaliths. His hoarse voice stopped and he stared toward them till Derek asked him to go on.
“Three.” He was almost whispering. “Three monsters. Gigantic. Jumping. She tried to run. They jumped too fast.”
“Monsters? What were they like?”
“Nothing on earth.” He shivered and stared at the megaliths, his lean black finger on the white birthmark. “Maybe like insects. Maybe like grasshoppers, if grasshoppers could be as big as airplanes. Not much like anything. They were hideous. Splotched yellow and green. Shiny like glass. Great red eyes that blazed like fire. Long hind legs. Short front limbs with claws.”
He shuddered again.
“Terrible claws. All bright metal the color of silver. Great metal jaws. And the things had wings. Stubby little wings that seemed too short. Spread when they glided. They came too fast for me. Nothing I could do.”
He shoulders sagged in helpless regret.
“One of them took her. Snatched her up with those bright claws. Gone with her before I got back to the tent. Carried her back to the monuments. Crawled between them. Never came out. Took her back to the hell where I was.”
He wiped at his eyes.
“No air there. No air she can breathe. I’m afraid she’s dead.”
“Maybe not.” Derek caught his arm. “We brought the oxygen gear. We can go after her. Try to find where she is and help her if we can. If your key can take us through.”
He cringed again.
“Of course.” He picked up the beer and got stiffly to his feet. “If we can.”
He stood a moment staring blankly down at the old water hole.
“If we can,” he muttered again, and shook his head. “If she’s alive.” He shivered. “I—I loved her. She found me shoveling dirt at Koobi Fora. She helped get me to college on the track scholarship. She brought me back to Africa to work with her on two more summer digs. She—well, she gave me a life.
He turned his head to hide his tears.
The western sun was already low, and the day had been exhausting. We could have rested and prepared for an early morning start, but nobody spoke of that. We uncrated three of the oxygen units and found the manuals. Printed in French and Arabic, they were brief and cryptic, but Ram deciphered them. We got the units assembled and tried them on. The smoke hoods had a sharp plastic stink and made vision difficult.
“No matter.” Derek’s muffled voice was hard to hear. “Not if they keep us alive.”
Ram asked how long the oxygen would last.
“Depends on demand,” Derek told him. “I hope it’s long enough.”
“To overtake those hopping things?” Ram took off the hood, wiped sweat off his forehead, shook his head. “We’ll never find Lupe alive. Not in the place where I was.”
“We can look,” Derek said. “If those trilithons are terminal gates—” His voice trailed off, but he caught his breath and went on. “We’ll go where we can. Learn what we can. Help Lupe if we can. Let’s get on with it.”
I longed for the comfort of a weapon, but airport security had forbidden knives or guns. We went empty handed, but the oxygen cylinders themselves made heavy burdens. We wore canteens of water clipped to our belts. I had a light backpack stuffed with a flashlight, spare batteries, a jacket, and not much else.
